gjerdery's blog

If you are working on a project or doing some research outside of the library, and have a question – don’t disturb mom & dad while they are watching “Law & Order,” contact an expert instead!

Available beginning this week is the opportunity to chat with a real live Luther librarian from the comfort of your laptop or mobile web browser. Visit the Library Research page and look for the link for “Research Help Chat” on the right side. Chat will be staffed regularly during Research Help Desk hours.

What are LISGuides?

LISGuides are a collection of subject and course guides designed by Luther librarians to connect you with the best resources related to the topics you are studying.

Where do I find LISGuides?

The easiest place to find LISGuides is from the Library Research page. Look for the “Find Resources” box on the left to look for guides listed by subject or course, or to search all LISGuides content. For example, if you are looking for resources related to English, select “English” from the “by Area of Study” dropdown box.

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This week saw a “behind-the-scenes” update to the search functionality of the LIS website, using the LuceneAPI Drupal module. This provides some additional administrative feature that improve the speed and relevance of site searches.

In light of this addition, it seems like a good time to talk some more about searching on the LIS site, and beyond. LIS offers a wide range of services, and therefore has an interesting mix of information up on the website, from how to use the Library catalog, to how to change your Norsekey.

There have been a couple of issues with III Millennium reported since our upgrade on Sunday (we are not able to definitively tell if these were caused by the upgrade, or were only observed as part of the routine system checks following the upgrade). Both issues were resolved quickly by III in the days following the upgrade.

• Airpac: The mobile version of books.luther.edu displays a Tomcat error message when a user attempts to view an item record.
• ResearchPro: After performing a search, many citations do not connect to the original resource, but instead display an error message.

The upgrade to the III software on Magnus completed at about 8:45 am on Sunday, July 18. Users should now be able to search for library materials via the Magnus website.

LIS staff using the Millennium client – you should see no difference in operation; if you do please let me know ASAP.

This Sunday, July 18, Magnus will be unavailable for a period of time before noon to allow for an upgrade to the III system software. The downtime will begin at 8:00am and is expected to last for at least one hour.

Those hoping to search the library’s holdings during this time will still be able to do so using the “Encore” and “WorldCat” tabs found on the Library Research page.

This software update marks the second phase of the project started in late May to bring our III automated system up to date with current hardware and software.

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A number of events (namely grading research papers and final exams for my Paideia II course) contributed to the belated nature of this report on meetings I attended April 19-23.

At the beginning of the week, I attended the Innovative Interfaces User Group convention in Chicago, along with John Goodin. As always, this meeting was a great place to tap into the collective knowledge of the user community. My focus for the two and half days was to glean as much as possible about III’s Electronic Resource Management module.

While the end of the school year may seem like a time to relax and unwind, as students trickle away during finals week, for many of us in LIS commencement literally marks the beginning of our busy time of year.

Magnus and Encore are now available following a successful server migration. Thanks to Adam Forsyth and Dave Huinker for all the help with server/networking setup!

A reminder that on Wednesday, June 9, the library’s online catalog will be unavailable all day, due to an upgrade to the server.

While Magnus is down, a link to WorldCat will be prominently posted to the library’s home page. While WorldCat displays results from many library collections around the world, search results do indicate the location of items held locally.

During the downtime for Magnus, Encore will also be unavailable for full searches of the catalog.